Discussion (24) ¬

Great strip! Also love the fanart.
I think Selkie made the right call. Truck’s. asking for too much too soon, and he still isn’t “letting people tell him no” in some ways. He needs to experience some real, lasting consequences: i.e “if you hurt people they may not just forgive and forget the minute YOU want them to”

Some species can survive in both fresh and salt waters; salmon migrate to the sea and then back up their freshwater source rivers to spawn. It’s Dave’s call, of course, but she could be able to endure saltwater for periods of time. It would open up a world of possibility & adventure…

Canonically, she would be able to breathe in saltwater as well as a human would. Scuba gear would be in full use if she wished to swim in the ocean, for protecting her gill openings as much as respiration. Possibly even Liquid breathing if she wished to avoid getting the mucus fits mid-dive.

I don’t recall the name of the special I watched offhand, and don’t have time to search for it now, but given all the talk of sociopaths on the previous page’s comments, I should like to point out that in at least one real-life case, a girl who had every mark of a sociopath — a girl emotionally incapable of feeling empathy for other people — actually learned empathy to the point where I would call her no longer a sociopath.

I have no idea what that means for her future, but since I had always heard that sociopaths are incurable and can never learn empathy, it was a jaw-dropping moment for me to see the change in her. (Assuming, which I do assume from all the stuff I saw on that special, that she isn’t just manipulating everyone into believing she’s had a change of heart, because manipulation is also a trait of sociopaths.)

But from that special, I now believe that — however rare this might be — sociopaths can indeed be cured.

Mmmmm… There’s a difference between sociopathy and narcissism. Perhaps you are thinking of narcissism.

The point of having the term “sociopath” means that if it’s a real diagnosis, the person is a sociopath and can learn to fake empathy (and even get real good at emotionally manipulating people because they are observing and manipulating others’ emotions while only pretending to display their real emotions). I don’t know how curable it is, but Sociopaths can’t just cure themselves because it’s a form of insanity. A sociopath is not going to decide to stop being a sociopath.

Extreme narcissism can seem like sociopathy, but it’s a character flaw which can be corrected if the person wants to stop being narcissistic. Truck seems to be this.

I understood it to be sociopathic or psychopathic at the time, which is why it shook my world understanding and made such an impression in my memory. Took a bit of hunting tonight, but I found it: Child of Rage, about Beth Thomas, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2-Re_Fl_L4

Stuff I just looked up says Reactive Attachment Disorder. I don’t recall whether they used the term sociopath (or psychopath) in the documentary, but I recall quite clearly that Beth seemed to utterly lack any sense of compassion or empathy for anyone else at all. She literally had to be taught empathy starting at like age 7. (There’s more info about her on this page: http://www.childrenintherapy.org/proponents/thomasb.html)

The thing is, when your empathy is that badly damaged – or nonfunctional – you are correct that they can’t just decide to switch it on. However, Beth showed me that it could be learned again, by some people, in some circumstances, using certain types of therapy. The best analogy I can come up with is a kid who went blind before he was a year old, and then years later got his eyes fixed, but had to learn how to work his sight into his awareness again because he had so long ignored that part of his brain. (There’s a real-life case similar to this, where a woman had eyes pointing two different ways, and so went through life ignoring the input of one eye and having monoscopic vision, but in her thirties came across a doctor who helped her with a certain therapy that brought her eyes into alignment… and she discovered 3d vision for the first time in her life, in her thirties. She’d get into a car to drive and the steering wheel would just pop out at her. She’d lie under a bush or tree looking up at the leaves and be unable to explain to her coworkers why she found it so fascinating.)

So my general position is: I don’t think any human being is born without… well, not empathy, because empathy is learned, but the capacity for empathy, the thing that will eventually become empathy. Maybe your brain gets damaged so that part of the brain just doesn’t work (e.g. how Phineas Gage lost the ability to self-censor his impulses after his accident); that’s incurable, maybe. Maybe the pathways toward it get clogged like arteries (probably a bad analogy for brain matter) so it’s there but can’t be accessed. Maybe you train yourself to ignore it. But if it’s still part of your brain, if it’s not completely dead in there, I’d think it could be fixed. Maybe through therapy. Heck, if it’s just part of the brain, maybe the person needs to feel what that part of the brain is like to realize how it’s supposed to work (like an atrophied muscle), so maybe there could be some work done with electrically stimulating parts of the brain until you find the part that makes for an empathic response to stimuli.

But although I acknowledge the possibility that certain lack-of-empathy states could be incurable, and others effectively incurable because they necessarily impair the desire to be cured (thus probably making consent impossible), that documentary made me less willing to say that broken empathies will stay broken for life.

Glad you like the fanart! I had fun with that one, since I don’t normally get to draw things like ships. Or Selkies.

Truck seems to me to be the guy who is really clueless about social cues. “You apologize and that’s that, everything’s OK”– he can’t seem to grasp that it is hard for people to put these experiences behind them and let everything be “OK” after that. So an inability to feel another’s pain is still a potential warning sign.

But then, it could be that he was raised to get whatever he wanted if he said the right words, but he seems really contrite. An act, maybe, but he doesn’t seem to be Oscar materiel. He’s probably sincere, just really clumsy and inarticulate about feelings.

How much you wanna bet this deal is along the lines of “I’ll only be friends with you if you promise not to hurt people anymore”? It might have alterations like instead “be friends with you” is “forgive you”

You notice she corrected herself and didn’t call him “Truck?” I think Tommy is having an eiphiny (sp) here. He’s trying to equate what he’s “always known” with what people are telling him now that he’s been caught acting out what he’s “always known.”

Don’t forget, while Tommy is unraveling his recent actions, so too is Tony, who was dismayed at how his “minor” prank turned into an avelanche of misfortune. He’s operating without a net (someone to talk to) as he deals with his role in things.